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White Lotus Academy
"There is no finer school in all the world." -Finn Identity Era: Third Founder: Syrreth Fealty: Bracada Distinctions: Ceremonial hats History Everyone who aspires to the life of an adventurer has a special attraction to some type of heroic career. Some are of a martial bent, finding their niche in the prowess that they bring to weaponry and feats of strength. Others gravitate to the path of the divine, relying on and furthering the causes of the deities they revere. Still others cannot resist the pull of arcane power - in their minds the purest and most potent of all forms of magic. One does not become a wizard by simply wanting to be, any more than one can pick up a sword and call oneself a warrior. Desire is for naught without education and training. Fortunately for any would-be spellcaster, the world includes a number of institutions of arcane study that exist for the purpose of passing on their knowledge to a new generation. Not every master of the arcane is self-taught. Most arcane practitioners learn from a single tutor, such as in an apprenticeship or through bargains with mighty powers, and some martial traditions pass on the lore of the swordmages. More than a few worthy candidates have been turned away from such arrangements for reasons of temperament or ambition - or getting on the teacher’s wrong side. For people who can’t partake in personal tutelage, there is the White Lotus Academy. Arcane schools are rarely founded and rarely survive long. Masters of the arcane arts are protective of their power. When one does found a school, its very nature attracts danger. Rivals seek revenge upon the instructors or headmasters for real or imagined slights. Governments feel threatened by the assemblage of power and act on those fears. Even the curriculum can sometimes destroy the school, such as when the Halls Recondite folded itself into the Far Realm through an accident of research and left behind only a spatial distortion that remains today. In the world of the arcane, schools gain reputation by surviving their first year. The White Lotus Academy has been teaching students for over 143 years. Beyond its institutional history, the White Lotus Academy appears in few annals. It has remained strictly apolitical. Students attend the academy from many nations, representing conflicting interests. They might return to those affiliations after graduation, but the school lends aid to and allies with no outside concerns. The restriction on interfering with external politics extends only to the White Lotus’s headmaster and instructors, as well as to sanctioned student activities. More than one student over the years has departed from the school out of a need to use his or her skills in defense of a homeland or an ideal. The school officially considers such departures to be leaves of absence, and it treats these activities as studies abroad and field training rolled into one. Though the school in no way encourages students to involve themselves in politics, the instructors consider such actions valuable training for students who are so inclined. Unless the student’s actions harm the school, as when Kendrick Maero ended a siege on his home city-state by claiming to represent all White Lotus Academy, he or she is readmitted without hesitation. As a group, the school’s members involve themselves in large-scale conflicts only when the school is directly threatened. Instructors and students went to war to defeat an undead army marching across the land, and a group of students once gained permission to infiltrate and overthrow a rising cult of Vecna as their graduation project. Category:Organization Category:Third Era